Tuesday, January 24, 2012

Running in circles

I feel like I'm chasing my own tail today. In trying to enter a story into my linguistic software, I got bogged down with the ongoing issues in formal word division that the current version of the orthography has. So, I stop to try to write something up detailing what morphemes are the ones that seem to be the most problematic. In the process of doing this, I see that the problematic morphemes are generally ones that do not have a comparable utterance position to Setswana. Furthermore, some of these morphemes occur in tiny clusters... or are they actually separate morphemes in their own right that just share syllables with other morphemes? I decide that I need to go through the available grammars to see what they say about the nature of these morphemes. I'm going to write a simplified grammar based on these more complex ones, then test with Shiyeyi speakers to see which of these should be written separately from the morphemes around them.

Time from sitting down and starting to type in the story to beginning the simplified grammar? Four hours! Half a day and I feel like I'm getting nowhere! And I still need to come up with some sort of Language learning activity for tomorrow morning's session. Aaagh!

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marriage survey

I'm always curious about how it goes down, how my friends got with the one they're with. So, thanks to Survey Monkey, I'm now hosting a survey of my married friends. Click here to take the survey. Survey responses are anonymous; I'm just looking for an overall feel, general patterns. When I get 100 responses, I'll share the trends here on the Dancing Sni. I tried to come up with questions that people would enjoy answering. Please... feed my curiosity!